Debian Question

[Stephen P. Ryan]

On Sat, 15 Feb 2003 18:10:15 -0500 Jefferson Kirkland
<numberwhun at attbi.com> wrote: 

> This question is for those of you out there who are 
> Debian users.  I have  recently installed Debian and am 
> starting to learn it's ways, but one major  thing that I 
> am lacking is Xwindows; it just wasn't installed.  I 
> would  love to get it and install it, but how do you do 
> that with apt-get?  I  tried doing 'apt-get install 
> X11', but it returned nothing.  Maybe I am  missing 
> something here and someone could please nudge me in the 
> right  direction. 

Close.  'apt-get install x-window-system' should do the
right thing for most of X (it claims to handle everything
but development/debugging); 'tasksel' should offer you a
list of tasks, one of which is the X Window System, but I've
never used tasksel so I don't know what it does from there.
 I think it's supposed to select all the packages for you.

> Also, if I have a package on the 
> debian cd that I would like to install, do  I have to 
> add the cdrom as a target for apt-get, or can I tell 
> apt-get on  the command line to look in a specific 
> directory on my cdrom?

apt-get needs to have a repository - i.e., probably not just
pointed at a specific directory.  apt-cdrom is a tool which
will add a specific cdrom to your /etc/apt/sources.list (and
apt-get will prompt you for the cd when it needs it).  If
there is just a specific package that you want to install
and you know exactly where it is, you can use dpkg directly,
i.e. 

# dpkg -i /cdrom/path/to/file/foo.deb

However, this will just complain if you're missing
dependencies, where apt-get will also grab the dependencies
for you, so you probably only want to do this for smaller
things.